He grinned at me, leaning on his pick, waiting I think for me to complain that he had been working for two people at the same time. 'It was a funny sort of night, no wind and black as hell with the clouds hanging right on top of us. I wouldn't have seen it except that Miguel had to turn the car and on the slope there the beam of the headlights swept across it. Your boat.' He nodded. 'The old Santa Maria.No doubt about it. I had Miguel turn back and hold the headlights right on her for a moment.'
Apparently she had been lying close in, right opposite the mouth of the cave. He couldn't see whether she was anchored or not. What he did see was that there were men on deck lowering a case into the water. He paused there and I asked him what he thought they were up to. 'Well, I tell you this, mate, they weren't fishing.'
'So what did you do?'
'Had Miguel turn the car and drive off, double quick. You see something like that, you don't hang around.'
'No.' I was thinking of Gareth Lloyd Jones and the King's Fleet. 'So what are you planning to do tonight?'
'Go and look at rock drawings.' He gave that funny grin of his and turned back to picking at the weed growth round the stone slab. 'You want to come?' And he added, 'But don't let on to Petra what I've told you. She'd be thinking of what happened that night at Gales Coves.'
The paths leading one deeper and deeper into trouble can be very tenuous. If Lennie hadn't shot his mouth off to Soo on my behalf, if Petra hadn't heard he was out of a job and asked him to help out on Bloody Island, if his arrival there hadn't coincided… But there are so many its in life, and the threads that weave the pattern of our existence seem so haphazard that we are inclined to attribute to accident what older races of men put down to fate. At that moment, on Bloody Island, I thought I couldn't be more deeply involved than I was. And yet, standing there in the sunshine, with all of Mahon and Villa Carlos spread out before me, the Golden Farm of Nelson fame red-roofed across the water on the long peninsula that ran out to the military casements and the big gun positions of La Mola, and the stone of the hospital ruins dark in shadow, I was on the threshold of something that would make my present circumstances seem totally irrelevant.
But I wasn't thinking about that. I was watching the Spanish patrol boat steaming back to the naval quay and passing through the narrows so close I could have thrown a stone on to its deck if I'd been standing by the beacon. And there was movement on Medusanow, a launch manned by bluejackets coming out from under her stern and pointing its bows to pass the other side of Bloody Island. There was an officer standing in the stern and somehow I knew it was Gareth, knew where he was going. I climbed to a vantage point at the south end of the hospital ruins and watched as the launch powered past me, cutting an arrowhead wake that pointed straight at Cala Figuera. A few minutes and it was alongside the quay we had built, Gareth clambering out and going straight across the road and in through the open door of the chandlery.
He was only there a short time. No reason for me to feel hurt, but I did, and when I returned to the dig, neither Lennie nor Petra made any reference to my absence. They were drinking coffee, and when we had finished, the three of us got to work.
All through the day we were hard at it, picking and shovelling with care and carting the rubble away. At one point we were involved in the awkward removal of a complete skeleton, and then, after only a short break for lunch, we hit what I thought at first was the island's bedrock. Petra was back by then, and as we uncovered more of it, she became very excited, her conviction growing that what she was unearthing really was a fallen taula. She had reason to be excited, for if it was a taula it would confirm the site as a megahthic religious complex. The centrepiece of such sites was always a huge stone monument of two rectangular slabs, one slotted into the top of the other in the form of a T, the upper slab like a lofty table raised sometimes as much as twelve to fourteen feet above the ground. Occasionally two slabs supported the top.
Petra's excitement was infectious and my mind gradually became concentrated on the dig. Before her father's death she had been working largely on her own. Now in one day the three of us had exposed all one side of a fallen upright, also part of the jointing of the capping slab, which unfortunately was broken into three pieces. I knew of at least eight taulas in Menorca, some of them either raised up or still standing, but this was the first I had ever seen on one of the subsidiary islands.
We went on until just after sunset, when we went back to the tent, lit the pressure lamp and had a celebratory drink. There was no doubt then about what it was we had uncovered. 'A taula here on Bloody Island — ' Her eyes were bright in the sizzling light. 'If only the professor I saw at the V and A about that cave drawing had been a little more enthusiastic, then with what I have discovered here I could have developed my theory on the growth of the Mediterranean culture to the point where I could have written a paper on it.'
CHAPTER TWO
We had a quick meal and left shortly after dark. Petra wasn't all that keen. I think she had accepted that any cave drawing she discovered on Menorca would be what she would call recent. It was Lennie who insisted on our taking a look at the water-worn passageway he had discovered by accident below the villa where he had been moonlighting. He was very determined I should see it. It was all open country, he said, and even if we were stopped the chances of my being recognised were slight. Anyway, I wanted to know what Evans had been doing with the Santa Mariamoored above that cave entrance.
Petra had a bag full of archaeological papers to justify her journey in the unlikely event that we ran into a roadblock, also she had fastened the beard more securely to my chin with some adhesive tape. Having forced myself to wear it all day, I had become quite used to it and she assured me it was a great improvement in my appearance. 'Very macho,' she whispered to me with a grin as she finally stuck it in place.
It was a clear night, no wind, and the stars very bright. We only passed two cars between the turn-off to the little fishing port of Es Grau and the crossroads where we turned right for Macaret and Punta Codolar. The warm air coming in through Petra's open window was full of the resin scent of pines and the more pungent smell of the maquis growth that blanketed much of the gravel country we were passing through.
The villa to which Lennie directed her was only a short distance from the half-completed one I had traded for Thunderflash,and as we swung down the western slope of the headland, I caught a glimpse of it, still with the scaffold up and what looked like a big removal van parked outside it, the box-like shape momentarily in silhouette against a naked light bulb shining from one of the downstair windows. I wondered if it was Evans and how he would react if Petra dropped me off there and I walked in on him. But then we were on the eastern arm of Arenal d'en Castell's little horseshoe cove and Lennie was telling her to drive on past what he called the cave villa. 'We'll park down by one of the hotels.'
The villa was in darkness, one of those architect-designed summer homes built into the rocky slope on several layers, its garden stepped in terraces. The owner was apparently — a German bank executive, and Miguel, who looked after it for him, had told Lennie he was not expected until the middle of June. We left the car at the first hotel, parked among a covey of hired Fiats, and climbed back up the hill, Petra with her bag of archaeological stuff slung over her shoulder, Lennie and I with the torches, pressure lamp, a bottle of wine and a coil of rope taken from his boat. The driveway swung off direct to the garage, which was built into the hillside at the bottom of the garden. 'We had to blast that out of solid rock.' Lennie had done the blasting. That was what he wanted me for.' He had worked at one time in one of the Kalgoorlie mines. He had been a prospector, too. 'It's limestone here, nice easy stuff. That's why there's caves and blowholes.' We climbed up the terraces and let ourselves in through the garden door, the house very dark inside and smelling faintly of paint and sea damp. 'Better not show a light.' Lennie closed the door and pocketed the key. 'Had it copied,' he said with a wink. 'You never know.' And he added, 'You two wait here while I locate the cellar door.'